Quote from: jibbajibba;372544Odd that a lot of complaints seem to be round modules, settings and supplements. All optional stuff you totally don't need.

It's true in my case that I complain more about the modules than the core game, but that's because I don't mind the core game at all. RC and 2e are the versions of D&D I got in with - 2e is the first version I ever personally owned, in fact.

Quote from: Bobloblah;372535Does it seem reasonable to say that most people's objections weren't really in the core game (or ruleset) that AD&D 2nd was?  That a lot of it revolved around directions later books/settings took?  I happen to feel that way about 3rd and 3.5: the base game was/is pretty good, but the WoTC splat books make me want to gag - munchkin city.  Let's not even talk about Prestige Classes...

Not really. Not in my particular case, I mean. I actually think that some of the base settings, some ideas and options from later 2nd ed books are at least salvageable, as evidenced by this very thread.

I really think that to me it comes down to the bigger picture of how the game (by which I mean "Dungeons & Dragons", all iterations, for all time) evolved over time. There are several very noticeable fractures in the game's evolution, and the first that is truly noticeable and taking the game in a widely different direction is 2nd edition, by removing aspects I like about First Ed's game play: we were talking about hexcrawling earlier, emphasis on dungeon exploration, miniatures were even mentioned earlier - and I like miniatures, personally, though under a specific set of assumptions/particular immersive mindset, medievalist fantasy as opposed to 'its own thing where everything goes', taking some color out of it (assassin, demons and devils, i.e. the "non-political-correctness" of 1E), and so on, so forth.

2nd edition is a more than playable game. Very enjoyable in and for itself (with the right people and in the right circumstances of course, much like any other game in existence), but on the scale of D&D's evolution, it's really the first culprit in a long line of different breaks that make the game evolve in -sometimes, most of the time, though not always- unfortunate ways.

Quote from: T. Foster;372548So, to me, 2E took a game that was 90% good and turned it into a game that's at most ~65% good. While a 65% good game is still pretty good in the overall scheme of things (and was enough to keep me playing 2E for about a year), it's a whole lot less than 90%

Also, this. Very well put indeed.

A bit of an ill-informed opinion here. I don't really know the difference between AD&D 1e and 2e. I know I played them a a fair bit at the time but I never actually read through or ran the game. The point is I never reallt liked the game.

I don't like splitting of races and classes. I think this was a sign taking fantasy away from the world of legends and myths and trying give it a certain faux-realism. It seems to say "this is a a real world with magic might look like" expect of course it dosen't follow though which makes all the more jarring to me. And all the small decision just rub me the wrong way.

Dual classes? Yuck. Let's make things even more bastardised.

What hell is a first level paladin? Did you get a certificate in the post that says 'bona-fide paladin' ?

Do we really need half-elves?

But above all I just never understood the rules. It all seemed very arbitary ("No, you are a ranger, you should fight with two weapons" "Ehi?") made even more confusing by the fact that each group did things differently. From what I could determine the system was not all that simple (I recall character sheets several pages long), it wasn't all that realisitic, it wasn't all that flexible and the combat wasn't really that deep tactically. So what exactly did those rules do well?

D&D 3e I get. It's not my kind of game but I see what it tries to do and it does that well. Basic D&D I get. It's a little clumsy but it is simple and iconic. AD&D is just a tangled mess to me.

For a different perspective on the settings aspect of 2e, I'm guessing I'm opposite of most folks. I would have thrown out Mystara and FR both in favor of Birthright. Greyhawk I could see as a legacy product and the "base" setting, but IMO Birthright presented so much of a superior "Western European" setting that it really would have been no contest. Setting aside the regency rules, which still are very cool but could indeed have been an add-on to any setting, BR presents extremely flavorful cultures with a plausible (in a fantasy context) backstory that has a very mythological feel, a reasonable (for a fantasy setting) explanation for the existence of a great many strange beasties, and also includes races that come across to me as much more than funny looking humans. The setting can be played all the way from a complex board game to a standard D&D setting, and there is plenty of room in the world for including other settings on other continents. To me, BR kicks FR's Frankensteinian, "everything but the kitchen sink", chock full 'o Mary Sues ass.

Quote from: T. Foster;372460Don't post, buy

This... is awesome, BTW. Thanks, Trent.

Quote from: Bobloblah;372535Can you expand on this at all?  Especially the "special-snowflakification" and "forgetting what the archetypes were really about," as I'm not sure I understand what you mean by those (or why).

I think the classic case, from what I've read, is the way the Ranger was changed from being an archetype based mainly on Aragorn to a "job" based on Drizzt. Thus, instead of specializing in fighting evil humanoids, the Ranger was genericized as specializing in any specific type of monster (player's choice). And notwithstanding Zeb Cook's claim to the contrary, the Ranger's two-weapon fighting ability in 2e is widely believed to come from Drizzt.

In general the pattern involves taking an archetype and turning it into a profession. Thus Clerics started in D&D based on fighting clergymen like the Templars, Bishop Odo, or Archbishop Turpin. Then the idea began to bump into naturalistic portrayals of polytheism in D&D rules & settings. (It's beside the point that the portrayals were inaccurate in historical terms.) So Clerics sort of became priests of arbitrary deities, but they kept their uniquely Templar-like qualities of having good hit dice, armor, and weapons.

Another example is raising level limits for demihumans. Some people hate level limits. Some people like them. For those who see them as a brake on munchkinesque favoring of the exotic and twinked races, and a way of preserving the humanocentric focus of the game, weakening the limits is a negative. But if you aren't acquainted with D&D's literary/mythological roots, the limits are pointless. Simply put: demihumans aren't protagonists in traditional fantasy. They may be more powerful than most humans, but legendary humans and human protagonists of fantasy stories tend ultimately to be "the best".

Quote from: Bobloblah;372535Can you expand on this at all?  Especially the "special-snowflakification" and "forgetting what the archetypes were really about," as I'm not sure I understand what you mean by those (or why).

I'm sure people's definition of "special-snowflakification" will differ. It's meaning is fluid, depending on particular experiences, likes/dislikes and so on, pretty much to the point of making it useless right off the bat, actually (much like the term "munchkin", by the way).

That's actually not the first criticism I would have thrown at 2nd ed, either, as you can see from my previous posts.

What I do get from the term, however, personally, is the tendency to understand players characters as "heroes" right from the start of the game, giving them 5 pages backgrounds prior to the first game session, making sure to provide all the mechanical gimmicks and options to make sure that the character is "unique", and so on, so forth.

In my experience, that's not what actually happened while playing First Ed. Your first level character had a name. You had a pretty vague idea of where your character was coming from, why he would become an adventurer, but that was pretty much it. Why? Because there was a strong chance that your character would never see his second level, to begin with! So you played with a rough idea of who your character was, were trying to play smart, play well, and if successful, then you had an entire background for the character... a background that was actually played in the game, not decided on a whim as a piece of fiction outside of it.

There again, I can see a shift in the understanding of the game that, in the end, I think was detrimental to its feel and specificities as a role playing game, rather than a fiction story game emulation.

Quote from: Bobloblah;372535I'd developed the impression that this was the core of where the real antipathy towards this edition developed.  Looking back I realize that the groups I played with used a little of the material from the Complete books, but not most of it.  We implemented some combat rules from the Complete Fighter and Complete Thief, as well as the pantheon-specifics from the Complete Priest, but rarely made use of kits from any of the books other than the Complete Wizard.  As a DM I got a lot of use (and still do) out of the DMGR series, as well as the historical campaign settings, buit those were setting and inspiration material, not so much what I would've called "Splat Books."  

I really liked the Complete Fighter, Priest, Thief and Wizard handbooks when they rolled out, personally. They had a lot of interesting fiddly bits, and not only in terms of kits, of course. But really, again, you see a shift in the game's design, a different way to look at it and understand its purpose.

The "kit" idea came from the "one concept = one class" paradigm which has been coexisting with the game since its humble beginnings. In some ways, you could even say that it all started when a guy (whose name I can't remember right off the bat) one day came up with the "Thief" character class, went on with all the different takes included in Greyhawk, Blackmoor, The Dragon etc, up to AD&D, which sealed some of them as "core identity" to the game, went on through kits and stuff, then prestige classes, and so on. The roots of this probably can be traced back to OD&D itself, with its way of handling non-human characters, and pointing out that if you want to play a Balrog, just go for it by making up some sort of class for the thing.

Well, to address the original question.

Second edition stunk.  Yes Al Quadim was brilliant.  Yes it was interesting that Beholders and Mind Flayers came from outer space.  Why were we always running into them underground though?

But what was done was a classic hack job by people who didn't know, understand, or care about the game.

Now I'm not in favour of radical rules changes and feel the core system of D&D is actually pretty good.  But second edition was a case of randomly scrapping and modifying rules without checking what else is screwed up by it.  Heavy crossbows that do 1d4+1 damage and take 2 rounds to load being a great example I always run to because it's so blatant when a long bow does 2d4 and makes 2 attacks per round and can be built to use the character's Strength bonus.  But there's stuff in the spells that are as bad or worse.  Stone skin comes to mind but it was still bad in 3rd edition.

Then there's the proficiencies and theif's skills mess.  Why isn't there a single integrated system here?  Why is my thief so much better at black smithing than stealing stuff?  Maybe he's in the wrong line of work.

And level limits?  How did those possibly make it into a second edition?  What a ridiculous and unwieldy concept.  But would it really be D&D if humans were actually a viable character race?  Nah!  Probably not.

Quote from: David Johansen;372577Yes it was interesting that Beholders and Mind Flayers came from outer space.  Why were we always running into them underground though?
.

It's the First law of Dr. Who: if you're evil and from outer space, you go underground right after you make planet fall.

Then there was the whole, experience system.  Don't get me wrong, I use the Rolemaster experience system as is out of the box.

The problem with D&D 2e's attempt to do the same type of thing occurred in low level parties with multiple magic users, who of course, select for diversity, share spells and quite possibly level up in the first session...

Quote from: Benoist;372576What I do get from the term, however, personally, is the tendency to understand players characters as "heroes" right from the start of the game, giving them 5 pages backgrounds prior to the first game session, making sure to provide all the mechanical gimmicks and options to make sure that the character is "unique", and so on, so forth.

Yes, this too.

I have to cop to not being very directly plugged-in to the 2e-hate. Never played the game, have only glanced at it when it came out and then, much later, on the second-hand shelves. So what anyone reads from me on this topic is a mix of personal impressions and my filtered reading of what I've seen written by others.

By the time 2e came out I was entirely alienated from D&D. Although I was initially curious about the inclusion of skills, when I looked at the game it just seemed like a continuation of the worst trends I'd seen in D&D through the 1980s, combined with a half-assed and inelegant attempt at incorporating mechanical concepts that had been percolating in other games.  (I probably thought of Runequest as the acme of RPG design at the time.)

This sense was reinforced by the artwork, fairly or unfairly. OD&D and 1e looked and played gritty. Then at some point you had the Hildebrand-ization of fantasy art, followed by the dominance in D&D of Easley, Parkinson, and Elmore. Without necessarily pointing the finger at them personally (art directors probably had a big hand in it, and I've at least seen stuff by Easley and Parkinson that breaks the mold), there was a shift toward romantic "high fantasy" images that continued into the 2e era.

So in my eyes 2e didn't do itself any favors, and when much, much later I decided to re-examine and reevaluate D&D, it was the editions with which I was already familiar: OD&D and AD&D 1e. "Basic" benefitted also because it really isn't very different from those two. While 2e probably would have gotten a "meh" from me circa 1990, compared to my anti-gonzo RQ/DQ/Harn/GURPS-ified disdain for the D&D I really knew, nowadays 2e still gets a "meh" while "old school" D&D gets new appreciation from me.

Quote from: Benoist;372557Not really. Not in my particular case, I mean. I actually think that some of the base settings, some ideas and options from later 2nd ed books are at least salvageable, as evidenced by this very thread.

I really think that to me it comes down to the bigger picture of how the game (by which I mean "Dungeons & Dragons", all iterations, for all time) evolved over time. There are several very noticeable fractures in the game's evolution, and the first that is truly noticeable and taking the game in a widely different direction is 2nd edition, by removing aspects I like about First Ed's game play: we were talking about hexcrawling earlier, emphasis on dungeon exploration, miniatures were even mentioned earlier - and I like miniatures, personally, though under a specific set of assumptions/particular immersive mindset, medievalist fantasy as opposed to 'its own thing where everything goes', taking some color out of it (assassin, demons and devils, i.e. the "non-political-correctness" of 1E), and so on, so forth.

2nd edition is a more than playable game. Very enjoyable in and for itself (with the right people and in the right circumstances of course, much like any other game in existence), but on the scale of D&D's evolution, it's really the first culprit in a long line of different breaks that make the game evolve in -sometimes, most of the time, though not always- unfortunate ways.

All the stuff you don't seem to like, like getting away from dungeons and hex crawling and getting into the city and more complex plots and 'story' are all the stuff I thought was great as it fitted how we played.

The dropping of the assasin class wasn't really a Pollitical correctness thing it was a move to return to 4 core classes and allow stuff like barbarians, illusionists, druids and assasins to fall out of the classed through the use of kits.
There were odd rules like ranger 2 weapons fighting and the fact that a base proficiency as it was based on stats ended up being high and extra slots were wasted. But that stuff was easy to house rule.
To me it was the move toward more immersive roleplaying that was the strength of 2e.

Quote from: jibbajibba;372660All the stuff you don't seem to like, like getting away from dungeons and hex crawling and getting into the city and more complex plots and 'story' are all the stuff I thought was great as it fitted how we played.

I understand. I got that from your posts.

Quote from: jibbajibba;372660The dropping of the assasin class wasn't really a Pollitical correctness thing it was a move to return to 4 core classes and allow stuff like barbarians, illusionists, druids and assasins to fall out of the classed through the use of kits.
There were odd rules like ranger 2 weapons fighting and the fact that a base proficiency as it was based on stats ended up being high and extra slots were wasted. But that stuff was easy to house rule.
To me it was the move toward more immersive roleplaying that was the strength of 2e.

Two things here.
1/ Yes. Removing the Assassin really was all about protecting TSR from lawsuits from people hunting D&D with pitchforks (though it was indeed reintroduced through the backdoor, via Complete Thief's Handbook).
2/ Immersive role playing =/= story gaming. Actually, I personally find story gaming to be detrimental to game immersion. At its worse, you are no longer your character in the game world - there is no identification left with your game avatar; you instead entertain a detached attitude, and look at your character as a narrative construct, as though the player was a "narrator" and the character was a "protagonist". That is not immersion, to me. That's fucking wankery.

Quote from: jibbajibba;372660All the stuff you don't seem to like, like getting away from dungeons and hex crawling and getting into the city and more complex plots and 'story' are all the stuff I thought was great as it fitted how we played.
.

Ah, but is D&D really the bests system for city adventures and complex plots?
I raised in a recent thread about "Non Attritional D&D". The resouce management aspect of D&D, the spell system in particular is geared towards dungeon/hex play. If you want to play a city based or more scene based game the economics and class/monster balance of the game changes completely in ways you may not necessarily want.

It' not deal breaker. I'm sure it can be D&D can be adpated to work in a scene based game and has been done so successfully by any GMs around the world, but I think there is a case to say its not a natural fit.